invocation 17

B H A V A N

Study notes and NewsletterNo.17 November 2002

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All quotations and photographs of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo arecopyright of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry, reproduced herewith acknowledgements and thanks to the Trustees. We are particularlygrateful for permission use the word �Invocation� in Sri Aurobindo�shandwriting as our banner.

Edited by Shraddhavan for Savitri Bhavan, AurovilleDesign by Prisma, Auroville

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C O N T E N T S

“What the Lord wants”a talk of the Mother to Huta 5

Sri Aurobindo on Savitri 8

Some Study Notes 14

Yoga in Savitritalk by Shruti 27

About Savitri Bhavan 45

The Adoration of the Divine Mother

At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,In their slow round the cycles turn to her call;Alone her hands can change Time's dragon base.Hers is the mystery the Night conceals;The spirit's alchemist energy is hers;She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,A power of silence in the depths of God;She is the Force, the inevitable Word,The magnet of our difficult ascent,The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,The joy that beckons from the impossible,The Might of all that never yet came down.All Nature dumbly calls to her aloneTo heal with her feet the aching throb of lifeAnd break the seals on the dim soul of manAnd kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.All here shall be one day her sweetness' home,All contraries prepare her harmony;Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes;In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell,Her clasp shall turn to ecstasy our pain.Our self shall be one self with all through her.In her confirmed because transformed in her,Our life shall find in its fulfilled responseAbove, the boundless hushed beatitudes,Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.

Savitri: p. 314-15

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S = SRI

A = AUROBINDO'S

V = VISION

I = IN SUPRAMENTAL

T = TRUTH

R = REVEALED

I = INTEGRALLY

(contributed by Gopal Bhagavat of Yelahanka)

A Savitri Acronym

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No. 17, November 2002What does the Lord want ?An Unpublished talk of the Mother to Huta

It was on 4th October 1963, when I went to the Mother. I showed her amessage given by her :

“What have you given to the Lord or done for Him that youask the Mother to do something for You?She does only the Lord’s work.”

I wondered, what does the Lord want as He has everything? What can bedone for Him, as He is capable of doing everything?

And here is the Mother’s reply :

“The Lord doesn’t demand anything except Surrender. Your wish, your want,your will, your thoughts and feelings, you must offer to Him without reserve,and let His will, thoughts, feelings, wish and wants become yours. In fact, letHis vibrations become your vibrations. Then there is no question of such mis-eries and troubles. You get the Lord and you get everything. But it can only bedone when you surrender totally to Him and to Him only. Not otherwise.

Well, I don’t say that the complete surrender is very easy. To give up every-thing is indeed difficult. Nevertheless, give everything : your sorrows, pains,difficulties and sufferings, to the Lord and tell Him, ‘These are Yours, takecare of them, this is Your responsibility and not mine.’ Try this and you willfind the difference. Surrender everything to Him and say, ‘Thee, Thee, onlyThee, O Lord.’

The soul who is the delegate of the Divine, represents the Divine. It tries togather the whole being’s substance together and to offer it to the Divine fortransformation. The soul is a portion of the Divine. And the sufferings of thesoul are always in proportion to its strength. These sufferings and pains arenot only for the soul but for the whole world, because nothing is separate -the whole world is one single thing. When beings suffer, the world suffers,the soul suffers, and the Divine suffers too. But the Lord doesn’t want any-body to suffer. He wants everyone to be happy. It is the human beings whomake things difficult.

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This Mother [pointing to herself] has a physical body with only two hands,two eyes and so on. But her Consciousness is Vast. She sends answers atonce without opening people’s letters. But unhappily, most of the peopleare not aware and cannot receive her answers, her Force and her Conscious-ness. Otherwise the work would be easier for the Mother. However, herwork is to lead everyone to his Goal.”

And when I questioned, “This rough, ugly and wretched world, will it everbecome a perfect golden divine world?” the Mother’s answer was :

“It is bound to happpen because it cannot be otherwise.”

Further she said :

Facsmile of part of Huta’s notes of the Mother’s talk to her

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No. 17, November 2002

© Huta D. Hindocha

on October 4 1963, with the Mother’s handwritten corrections.

This world is a condensation of energy. What we see - human beings,animals, trees, plants etc. etc., are merely a condensation of energy andnothing else. Recently scientists have tried to find out all about the materialworld, and have come to the conclusion that everything is made of elemen-tary particles (electrons, protons) that are nothing but condensed energy.But of course energy is really conscious energy and behind everything thereis only the One, the great Conscious Power, the Supreme who holds every-thing in Him and wills to carry everyone to his Goal and to manifest Him-self in all, and thus the world ought to become only He who is everything.”

OM.

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Sri Aurobindo on SavitriExtracts from a letter of 1947

This long letter appears amongst the Author’s Letters on Poem at the end ofSABCL Vol. 29. It was written in response to a request from Amal Kiran,who had received comments on Sri Aurobindo’s poetry from a literary friendin Bombay. It contains many interesting clarifications about Sri Aurobindo’sintentions in writing Savitri, some of which we bring together here.

He begins :

You have asked me to comment on your friend X’s comments on mypoetry and especially on Savitri. But, first of all, it is not usual for apoet to criticize the criticisms of his critics though a few perhaps havedone so; the poet writes for his own satisfaction, his own delight inpoetical creation or to express himself and he leaves his work for theworld, and rather for posterity than for the contemporary world, torecognise or to ignore, to judge and value according to its perception orits pleasure. … However, since you have asked me, I will answer, asbetween ourselves, in some detail and put forward my own commentson his comments and my own judgment on his judgments. It may berather long; for if such things are done, they may as well be clearly andthoroughly done. I may also have something to say about the nature andintention of my poem and the technique necessitated by the novelty ofthe intention and nature. (p. 785)

At the end of the letter, he remarks :

I had intended as the main subject of this letter to say something abouttechnique and the inner working of the intuitive method by which Savitriwas and is being created and of the intention and plan of the poem … Thatwas to be the body of the letter and the rest only a preface. But the prefacehas become so long that it has crowded out the body. I shall have to postponeit to a later occasion when I have more time. (p. 801)

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Here are a few extracts from the body of the letter :

The length of Savitri :I have said that his objections are sometimes inapplicable. I mean by thisthat they might have some force with regard to another kind of poetry butnot to a poem like Savitri. He says, to start with, that if I had had a strongerimagination, I would have written a very different poem and a much shorterone. Obviously, and to say it is a truism; if I had had a different kind ofimagination, whether stronger or weaker, I would have written a differentpoem and perhaps one more suited to his taste; but it would not have beenSavitri. It would not have fulfilled the intention or had anything of thecharacter, meaning, world-vision, description and expression of spiritualexperience which was my object in writing this poem. Its length is anindispensable condition for carrying out its purpose and everywhere thereis this length, … in every part, in every passage, in almost every canto orsection of a canto. It … aims not at a minimum but at an exhaustive expositionof its world-vision or world-interpretation. One artistic method is to select alimited subject and even on that to say only what is indispensable, what iscentrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination or understandingof the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if youlike, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation,omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness: that isthe method I have chosen in Savitri. (p. 791-92)

A legend and a symbol :His objection of longeur would be perfectly just if the description of thenight and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn;but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the cantoclearly suggests, a symbol, through what may be called a real symbol of aninner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thingsymbolized; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow anddifficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid andprophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the “day” of ordinaryhuman consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. Thewhole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is asymbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning and

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announcement. So understood there is nothing here otiose or unnecessary;all is needed to bring out by suggestion some aspect of the thing symbolizedand so start adequately the working out of the significance of the wholepoem. It will of course seem much too long to a reader who does notunderstand what is written or, understanding, takes no interest in the subject;but that is unavoidable. (p. 792-93)

Poetic techniqueThe critic had objected to repetition of some phrases of a similar meaning,“sombre Vast”, “unsounded Void”, “opaque Inane” and “vacant Vasts” inthe passage describing the Dawn in Canto One, and had especiallycondemned their occurrence in the same place at the end of the line. SriAurobindo comments:

What was important for me was to keep constantly before the view of thereader … the ever-present sense of the Inconscience in which everything isoccurring. It is the frame as well as the background without which all thedetails would either fall apart or stand out only as separate incidents. Thatnecessity lasts until there is the full outburst of the dawn and then itdisappears; each phrase gives a feature of this Inconscience proper to itsplace and context. … (p. 793)

In connection with the second point, Sri Aurobindo goes on to elucidate thekind of blank verse used in Savitri.

As for the occurrence of the phrases in the same place each in its line,that is a rhythmic turn helpful, one might say necessary to bring out theintended effect, to emphasise this reiteration and make it not onlyunderstood but felt. It is not the result of negligence or an awkward andinartistic clumsiness, it is intentional and part of the technique. Thestructure of the pentameter blank verse in Savitri is of its own kind anddifferent in plan from the blank verse that has come to be ordinarilyused in English poetry. It dispenses with enjambment or uses it verysparingly and only when a special effect is intended; each line must bestrong enough to stand by itself, while at the same time it fitsharmoniously into the sentence or paragraph like stone added to stone;the sentence consists usually of one, two, three or four lines, more rarely

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five or six or seven: a strong close for the line and a strong close for thesentence are almost indispensable except when some kind of inconclusivecadence is desirable; here there must be no laxity or diffusiveness in therhythm or in the metrical flow anywhere, - there must be a flow but nota loose flux. This gives an added importance to what comes at the closeof the line and this placing is used very often to give emphasis andprominence to a key phrase or a key idea, especially those which haveto be often reiterated in the thought and vision of the poem so as torecall attention to things that are universal or fundamental or otherwiseof the first consequence - whether for the immediate subject or in thetotal plan. It is this use that is served here by the reiteration at the end ofthe line. (p. 793-94)

The right inspiration and the right transcription of it :He continues:

I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of merepicturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am tryingto do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen,something felt or experienced; ... When the expression has been found,I have to judge, not by the intellect or by any set poetical rule, but by anintuitive feeling, whether it is entirely the right expression and, if it isnot, I have to change and go on changing until I have received theabsolutely right inspiration and the right transcription of it and mustnever be satisfied with any à peu près or imperfect transcription even ifthat makes good poetry of one kind or another. … (p.794)

I have enough respect for truth not to try to cover up an imperfection; myendeavour would be rather to cure the recognized imperfection; if I havenot poetical genius, at least I can claim a sufficient, if not an infinite capacityfor painstaking: that I have sufficiently shown by my long labour on Savitri.Or rather, since it was not labour in the ordinary sense, not a labour ofpainstaking construction, I may describe it as an infinite capacity for waitingand listening for the true inspiration and rejecting all that fell short of it,however good it might seem from a lower standard until I got that which Ifelt to be absolutely right. (p.795)

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Critical appreciation of a new kind of poetry :Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of thecommon kind and is often very far from what the general human mindsees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understandingfrom the general public or even from many at the first touch; as I havepointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesisto appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry. Moreover if it is really newin kind, it may employ a new technique, not perhaps absolutely new,but new in some or many of its elements: in that case old rules andcanons and standards may be quite inapplicable; … We have to seewhether what is essential to poetry is there and how far the new techniquejustifies itself by new beauty and perfection, and a certain freedom ofmind from old conventions is necessary if our judgment is to be validand rightly objective. (p. 794-95)

One who has had the kind of experience which Savitri sets out to expressor who, not having it, is prepared by his temperament, his mental turn,his previous intellectual knowledge or psychic training, to have somekind of access to it, the feeling of it if not the full understanding, canenter into the spirit and sense of the poem and respond to its poeticappeal; but without that it is difficult for an unprepared reader to respond,– all the more if this is, as you contend, a new poetry with a new law ofexpression and technique. (p. 797-98)

If you are right in maintaining that Savitri stands as a new mystical poetrywith a new vision and expression of things, we should expect, at least atfirst, a widespread, perhaps a general failure even in lovers of poetry tounderstand it or appreciate; even those who have some mystical turn orspiritual experience are likely to pass it by if it is a different turn from theirsor outside their range of experience. It took the world something like ahundred years to discover Blake; it would not be improbable that there mightbe a greater time-lag here, though naturally we hope for better things. For inIndia at least some understanding or feeling and an audience few and fitmay be possible. Perhaps by some miracle there may be before long a largerappreciative audience. (p. 799-800)

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There may still be a place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the fieldof poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual life of man and hisnow occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hiddenrange of his and the world’s being, not a corner and a limited expressionsuch as it had in the past, but a wide space and as manifold and integralan expression of the boundless and innumerable riches that lie hiddenand unexplored as if kept apart under the direct gaze of the Infinite ashas been found in the past for man’s surface and finite view andexperience of himself and the material world in which he has livedstriving to know himself and it as best he can with a limited mind andsenses. The door that has been shut to all but a few may open; thekingdom of the Spirit may be established not only in man’s inner beingbut in his life and works. Poetry also may have it share in that revolutionand become part of the spiritual empire. (p. 800-01)

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Study NotesResponses to queries from readers

1. Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire …

A reader has asked about the meaning of two lines which occur in SavitriBook Seven, Canto 7, page 537 :

Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fireCircling in a corner of its boundless self …

In order to understand these lines, we have to see them in the context of thepassage in which they are set. It forms part of a message spoken to Savitriby a Voice of Light, which comes to her after she has had a surprisingexperience of utter blackness, an “intolerant Darkness” which leaves “herinner world laid waste” – the “kingdom of delight” which she had experiencedafter the union of her individual soul with the Oversoul “was there no more”.Then the Voice of Light explains to her her mission, and the conditions forfulfilling it. Amongst other things, she is told :

He who would save the world must be one with the world,All suffering things contain in his heart’s spaceAnd bear the grief and joy of all that lives.His soul must be wider than the universeAnd feel eternity as its very stuff,Rejecting the moment’s personalityKnow itself older than the birth of Time,Creation an incident in its consciousness,Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fireCircling in a corner of its boundless self,The world’s destruction a small transient stormIn the calm infinity it has become.

The two lines we have been asked about illustrate the soul-state Savitri willnow have to attain. Her soul must become wider than the whole universe

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and experience that the entire creation, the whole manifested universe, isjust an incident, a small happening within its consciousness. In that vastconsciousness, wider than the whole universe, those huge brilliant stars,perhaps not just suns but immense galaxies, which men call Arcturus andBelphegor, are only tiny fiery grains, orbiting in a small corner of theboundless self of Savitri. In that state, even the destruction of the wholeworld would seem like only a small passing storm in the infinite expanse ofcalm that is now her soul.

Then the great Voice goes on to tell Savitri how to make use of theexperience of all-negating darkness she has just gone through, in order toattain that vast consciousness in which her soul is “wider than the universe”and feels “eternity as its very stuff” which will enable her to fulfil the greatmission for which she has taken human birth – to save Satyavan, the Soul ofMan, and thus to save the world.

2. Invoking the grace of rain

A reader writes :

“In many places this year the rainfall is not much, and particularly in TamilNadu people are suffering from need of water. Will you kindly help bymentioning from Savitri any particular Book, Canto, page number, so thatwe can invoke the Lord and Divine Mother and pray to them for rain ?”

Consulting the “Savitri Concordance” compiled by Jyoti and Prem Sobel,published by All India Books in 1984 and available from Vak Bookshopin Pondicherry, 19 references to “rain” were found in Savitri. Most ofthem were very beautifully evocative descriptions of inner experiences,referring to “golden rain”, “nectarous rain”, “magic rain” and “mystic rain”.

In two places Sri Aurobindo refers to the actual “rainy season” of India.The first is in Book Four, “The Book of Birth and Quest”, Canto One,“The Birth and Childhood of the Flame”, which begins with a wonderfuldescription of the seasons of the Indian year, starting from Summer,followed by “Rain-tide”, then Autumn, Winter and Dew-time, andleading up to Spring and the birth of Savitri. Then in Book Seven, “The

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Book of Yoga”, Sri Aurobindo again evokes the seasons of the yearfollowing Savitri’s union with Satyavan, which takes place in theSummer. It is when the rains set in that Savitri begins to notice thepassing of time, and to feel the grief of her forthcoming separation fromSatyavan; and it is towards the end of the rainy season that a Voice fromabove instructs her to look within to find her soul, in order to conquerTime and Death.

The following passage from Book Eleven, “The Book of Everlasting Day”,Canto One, “The Eternal Day: the Soul’s Choice and the SupremeConsummation” might be found suitable for invoking the Lord and the DivineMother, in order to pray to them for rain :

There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.It has no home on earth, no centre in man,Yet is the source of all things thought and done,The fount of the creation and its works,It is the origin of all truth here,The sun-orb of mind’s fragmentary rays,Infinity’s heaven that spills the rain of God,The Immense that calls to man to expand the Spirit,The wide Aim that justifies his narrow attempts,A channel for the little he tastes of bliss.

(p. 705)

Invoking that consciousness above the mind which is “the source of allthings thought and done”, a prayer might be made for “the streaming ofGod’s rain” (p.104). One might then try to steep oneself in the essence ofrain-tide as described by Sri Aurobindo, aspiring to bring it closer to presentearth-reality :

Rain-tide burst in upon torn wings of heat,Startled with lightnings air’s unquiet drowse,Lashed with life-giving streams the torpid soil,Overcast with flare and sound and storm-winged dark

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The star-defended doors of heaven’s dim sleep,Or from the gold eye of her paramourCovered with packed cloud-veils the earth’s brown face.Armies of revolution crossed the time-field,The clouds’ unending march besieged the world,Tempests’ pronunciamentos claimed the skyAnd thunder drums announced the embattled gods.A traveller from unquiet neighbouring seas,The dense-maned monsoon rode neighing through earth’s hours:Thick now the emissary javelins:Enormous lightnings split the horizon’s rimAnd, hurled from the quarters as from contending camps,Married heaven’s edges steep and bare and blind:A surge and hiss and onset of huge rain,The long straight sleet-drift, clamours of winged storm-charge,Throngs of wind-faces, rushing of wind-feetHurrying swept through the prone afflicted plains:Heaven’s waters trailed and dribbled through the drowned land.Then all was a swift stride, a sibilant race,Or all was tempest’s shout and water’s fall.

(p.349 – 50)

A note of caution may be sounded, however. While at one time of droughtthe Mother had responded to requests from her children by giving someinstructions on how they might call the beings who control rainfall, on alater occasion it seems that she advised that it is better not to interfere inthese matters, which are the domain of the gods. Nevertheless a sincereprayer may always be offered to the Mother and the Master, provided weare prepared to take “No” for an answer!

3. Less than zero, more than one

A reader has asked us to throw some light on the following lines, especiallythe last two :

A charm drew near that could not keep its spell

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An eager Power that could not find its way,A Chance that chose a strange arithmeticBut could not bind with it the forms it made,A multitude that could not guard its sumWhich less than zero grew and more than one.

(p.173)

This passage occurs near the beginning of Book Two, “The Book of theTraveller of the Worlds”, Canto Six, “The Kingdoms and Godheads of theGreater Life”.

In his quest, Aswapati, the traveller of the worlds, mounting the “World-Stair”, “the single stair to being’s goal” passes from the plane of SubtleMatter to the worlds of Life. There he discovers that, despite the troubledface of Life that we know on earth, in truth

Her moods are faces of the Infinite:Beauty and happiness are her native right,And endless Bliss is her eternal home.

(p. 118)

In the second and third sections of Book Two Canto Three, “The Glory andthe Fall of Life”, Aswapati is shown the blissful Kingdoms which are theglorious true eternal home of the Life Goddess. But

This world of bliss he saw and felt its callBut found no way to enter into its joy.

(p. 128)

When Life poured her blessings onto the evolving earth “Hoping to fill afair new world with joy” some dark presence intervened and brought abouta mysterious evil change in her. Life on earth is distorted and darkened, andthough Aswapati can see its essential truth of bliss, he cannot enter into it.

So he sets out to find and know

… the obscure causeOf all that holds us back and baffles God

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In the jail-delivery of the imprisoned soul.(p. 135)

This search leads him through the Kingdoms and Godheads of the LittleLife (Book Two, Cantos Four and Five), and then onwards, through athreefold transitional zone, to the Kingdoms and Godheads of the GreaterLife. It is part of this transitional zone which is being referred to in thepassage we have been asked about. Escaping from the ‘grey anarchy’ of‘the vague Inconscient’s dark and measureless cave’ Aswapati comes firstinto ‘an ineffectual world’,

A purposeless region of arrested birthWhere being from non-being fled and daredTo live but had no strength long to abide.

(p. 173)

But then Aswapati reaches a slightly more hopeful level :

After denial dawned a dubious hope,A hope of self and form and leave to liveAnd the birth of that which never yet could be,And joy of the mind’s hazard, the heart’s choice,Grace of the unknown and hands of sudden surpriseAnd a touch of sure delight in unsure things:To a strange uncertain tract his journey cameWhere consciousness played with unconscious selfAnd birth was an attempt or episode.

(p.173)

It is here that we find the lines that our reader has asked about :

A charm drew near that could not keep its spell,An eager Power that could not find its way,A Chance that chose a strange arithmeticBut could not bind with it the forms it made,

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A multitude that could not guard its sumWhich less than zero grew and more than one.

(p.173)

We understand that these are levels in the manifestation of life-creation. Inthe regions before the World of Greater Life, there are these mistyintermediate levels where life-forms are preparing to take birth. Elsewherein this issue of Invocation we can find Shruti speaking about the “madhyamavak” and the Dream State, where the determining equations or organisingformulas underlying the manifestation of forms are prepared. This spacethat Aswapati travels through seems to belong to that level. In it, the equationsare not firm and clear. Here, the eager creative power does not find the wayto manifest the charm it envisions. It has to operate through a process ofrandom choices, resulting in “a strange arithmetic” – resulting in a multitudeof forms that are always fluctuating in quantity, so that the sum of thembecomes ‘less than zero’ and ‘more than one’.

Physicists tell us that in our world, matter, the substance of manifestation,is governed by some fundamental laws. The most fundamental one of all isthat the total sum of matter in existence remains always the same – mattercan change form, convert to energy and back again, but the sum-total remainsalways constant. This sum total of all the matter in our universe can bethought of as an integer: 1, the unity of matter. Nowadays physicists believethat at a very fundamental level of matter, at every instant, sub-atomicparticles are constantly going out of existence and becoming ‘anti-matter’;but since at the same instant new ones are being formed, the constant balanceof matter and anti-matter is maintained. That is the very basis of our worldof solid forms. But we can imagine that at a much subtler level ofmanifestation, such as that described here by the poet, this balance betweenbeing and non-being is not constant, but on the contrary, fluctuates wildly,so that the sum-total of forms in existence can become less than zero, andmore than one. This would result in a great instability of forms – formscannot be bound, cannot be maintained in a steady state by this strangearithmetic. And that is precisely the character of the level which Aswapati isdescribed as passing through at this point in his journey. Very soon he comesfurther, to a realm that is able to “Half-manifest … a veiled Reality’ (p. 176).But at this point he is still in a place where

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Nothing was solid, nothing felt complete:All was unsafe, miraculous and half-true.It seemed a realm of lives that had no base.

(p.175)

4. A contrary Doom

Another query relates to the line,

A contrary Doom that threatens all things made, …

The full sentence reads :

A hidden Puissance conscious of its force,A vague and lurking Presence everywhere,A contrary Doom that threatens all things made,A Death figuring as the dark seed of life,Seemed to engender and to slay the world.

(p. 202)

It lies near the beginning of Canto Seven of Book Two “The Descent intoNight”. ‘Doom’ means ruin, catastrophe, fatality, death; ‘Doomsday’ inChristian cultures refers to the day of the Last Judgement and the end of theworld. ‘Contrary’ means opposite, but also contradictory; the phrase“contrary motion” refers to a movement in two opposite directions. Herethe Doom is not an event or a mere bad end, but a being, a Puissance, aPresence. This Doom is contrary, not only because it is opposing andthreatening, but also because it contains a contradiction, a movement in twoopposite directions: although it is a power of Death, it seems to be the seedand origin of life. It seems to ‘engender’, that is ‘father’ or give rise to theworld, as well as to slay or destroy it.

5. Tripod

In the following Canto, “The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil andthe Sons of Darkness’ we find this passage, which we have also been asked

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to elucidate :

Thought sat, a priestess of Perversity,On her black tripod of the triune SnakeReading by opposite signs the eternal script,A sorceress reversing life’s God-frame.

(p. 221)

The key to the image here is the word ‘tripod’. It literally means ‘three feet’and refers to a three-legged stand. Small versions of these can be found inlaboratories and are used to support retorts or flasks above a flame. In ancientGreece tripods were highly prized sacred objects, often made of bronze andgiven as ritual gifts. It seems that they may have been used to hold upofferings burnt for the gods. The ones I have seen in museums are not bigenough to support a human being, but the word also refers to the stool onwhich the priestess at Delphi sat to deliver an oracle. This is the allusionhere.

The shrine at Delphi was the most famous oracle of the ancient Greeks.When consulting the oracle, the priestess used to enter an underground caveand go into trance. Seated on a sacred tripod, she would communicate withthe god and utter his message in strange sounds that had to be interpreted bypriests, who gave the answer in human language, but often in a crypticriddling form that might be misunderstood. The shrine was sacred to Apollo,the Sun-God, Lord of the Muses, and of Inspiration. But it seems that theoracle had been there long before the shrine. Legend tells that Apollo had towin control of that place of power by defeating its original ruler, a monstrousPython. And the priestess continued to be called the Pythia, or even thePythoness, with the perjorative sense of a witch or sorceress.

Sri Aurobindo uses the word ‘tripod’ in two other places in Savitri, andall the three uses have a related significance.

The first occurs in Book One, Canto Three, “The Yoga of the King: theYoga of the Soul’s Release”, and refers to one of the stages of Aswapati’sYoga, a section which describes in detail the action of the goddess ofInspiration. It reads :

The inspiring goddess entered a mortal’s breast,

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Made there her study of divining thoughtAnd sanctuary of prophetic speechAnd sat upon the tripod seat of mind:All was made wide above, all lit below.In darkness’ core she dug out wells of light,On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadthsBore earthward fragments of revealing thoughtHewn from the silence of the Ineffable.

(p. 41)

Aswapati’s breast is the sacred cavern, the sanctuary of prophetic speech,which the inspiring goddess chooses as the place for revealing higher truths;his mind, silent and receptive, is the tripod seat on which she sits to makeher revelations of light.

In a passage on page 371 the same image is used in relation to the conditionof Mankind in the Ignorance.

A spell is laid upon his glorious strengths;He has lost the inner Voice that led his thoughts,And masking the oracular tripod seatA specious Idol fills the marvel shrine.

(p. 371)

But in the passage on page 221, which we have specifically been askedabout, we are in the World of Falsehood, where every divine power is turnedinto its dark opposite. There Thought, instead of being a priestess of light, is apriestess of Perversity, of twisted crookedness. Her tripod, her seat or support is“the triune Snake”. ‘Tri-une’ means ‘three-in-one’ or threefold. Writing of thesymbolism of the triangle, with its three sides, Sri Aurobindo says :

In one position it can symbolise the three lower planes, in anotherthe symbol is of the three higher ones. (23:955)

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In this context, this threefoldness is obviously of the lower planes. Aboutthe symbolism of the snake or serpent Sri Aurobindo has said :

The serpent is a symbol of force, very often a hostile or evil force ofthe vital plane.. (23:975)

Serpents indicate always energies of Nature, and very often badenergies of the vital plane. (10:977-78)

So this priestess of Perversity is supported by a threefold energy of theperverted vital planes. She interprets the eternal script, which recordsthe presence and the action of the Divine in manifestation, by oppositesigns, falsifying and denying its message. She is a sorceress who by herblack arts turns upside down or inside out the Divine frame of life, givingit an opposite sense.

6. The red Wolf and the hounds of bale

In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudesCompanionless he roamed through desolate waysWhere the red Wolf waits by the fordless streamAnd Death’s black eagles scream to the precipice,And met the hounds of bale who hunt men’s heartsBaying across the veldts of Destiny,In footless battlefields of the AbyssFound shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokesAnd bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.

(p. 230)

Here the question has been particularly about the significance of ‘thered Wolf’ and ‘the hounds of bale’. In his solitary journey through theWorld of Falsehood Aswapati encounters inner enemies of differentkinds. ‘The red Wolf’ reminds us of what Sri Aurobindo has mentionedabout the significance of the wolf in the Vedic language, where it is

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referred to as ‘vrka’ - the Tearer. The hungry savage animal who tears atits prey with sharp teeth – this was the predominant image of the wolfto our forebears. The Wolf encountered by Aswapati is clearly a Tearerfrom the dark perverted vital worlds. Red is the colour of rajas, passionand desire. We may remember that the Vital Mind is described in Savitrias ‘A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass’

A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass,A rash Intelligence leaped down lion-manedFrom the great mystic Flame that rings the worldsAnd with its dire edge eats at being’s heart.Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.

(p. 247)

The red Wolf, lying in wait at a difficult point in the journey, the streamwhere there is no easy crossing, is a formidable enemy, backed up byblack eagles (who also have beaks and talons that are strong for tearingtheir prey) threatening inner death and destruction. While these enemiesattack in a mountainous inner landscape, in a different kind of setting,the ‘veldts’, or open unforested grasslands, the Seeker is pursued bypacks of hunting dogs. These are the open fields of Destiny, and thehounds are no physical animals but symbolic ones representing ‘bale’ –misfortune and suffering.

7. The sessions of the triple Fire

Another reader has requested :“Kindly refer to Book Two, Canto 15, page 299, lines 92 - 94

On peaks where Silence listens with still heartTo the rhythmic metres of the rolling worlds,He served the sessions of the triple Fire.

I shall feel obliged if you can explain these lines, and especially the phrase‘the triple Fire’.”

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These lines occur in the Canto called “The Kingdoms of the GreaterKnowledge”. At this high level, almost at the summit of the World Stair,Aswapati is able to see and understand the principles which maintain thecosmos. He has risen far above the worlds of Matter and of Life, and evenabove the sphere of Mind. ‘Sessions’, meaning ‘sittings’, is a word used ofjudges and tribunals. Magistrates ‘serve’ on ‘sessions’, when they have totake their place as judges and regulators of law and order. Here it sounds asif Aswapati has risen to a level where he has the knowledge and vision toassist in the process of cosmic regulation. But what is this ‘triple Fire’? Wemight think either of the Fire principle active on the three main levels ofmanifestation: physical, vital and mental. Or we might think of the threefoldaction of the inner Fire, Agni: aspiration, purification, and Tapasya, all leadingto transformation. Fire has a transforming, purifying, energising and upliftingaction throughout the universe. Aswapati, now seated on this high level, isable to serve and assist this Fire principle in its universal action.

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No. 17, November 2002Some aspects ofYoga in SavitriTalk by Shrutiat Savitri Bhavan on August 18, 2002

Shruti, who was our guest-speaker in August, is a musician, a musicologist,an educationist, a teacher trainer, an exponent of Upanishads and Vedasand a researcher in the Vedic and other ancient sciences of sound (Nada,Mantra). In addition to this talk, she gave a four-day workshop on the IshaUpanishad at Savitri Bhavan, which was very well-attended and muchappreciated.

OM! Sahanaavavatu sahanau bhunaktu Saha veeryam karavaavahai Tejasvinaavadheetamastu Ma vidvishaavahai Om Shantih Shantih Shantih !

Namaste! We just heard the mantra and it seeped into us, without the barriersof the mind. Today when we speak of Yoga in Savitri, we will hear with ourhearts, not with the labouring mind, because as Sri Aurobindo says, whenwe hear ‘with the labouring mind’, we find ‘bright hints, not the embodiedtruth:’ So we shall hear it in our depths, in our silences beyond the mind, sothat we may carry it back with us when we leave this space of togetherness.

To speak of Yoga in Savitri is really to speak of every page in this great epicpoem, because every word of it is yoga. Every word is a push for our beingon our journey of consciousness. Yet, today we will speak of just some ofthe aspects that our master Sri Aurobindo has brought forward to us, whichlight our path and show us the way to the Truth.

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The Fourfold BeingFirst, to understand what we are. In this Creation, we are nothing butholograms of the Divine. We are little forms of the divine, growing up toour true divinity. So let us begin with a description of the divinity, which isimmanent in all creation. The Divine in creation presents himself as theFourfold Being. Each one of us is this fourfold being, growing up to theawareness of these four folds. What are these four folds? We see that here inSavitri Sri Aurobindo echoes the thought of the Mandukya Upanishad as hespeaks of ‘the inexhaustible word,’ the Divine Word or AUM in which liesthe Fourfold Being, or through which the Divine expresses his FourfoldBeing in every aspect of creation, in every living form.

Before we read the passage, I would like to speak of what these fourfolds are and how they are manifest in everything that we do in our lives.This goes back to the concept of the whole world being vibration in differentstages, which is also called ‘Vak’ – speech vibration, communication.

If we look at our own creativity – we being little parts of the Divine –how do we create something? We create out of the sea of potential whichlies within us, the sea of infinite possibility.

From that potential comes forward an impulse, a vision.From that vision, we come down to calculate the skills, the laws, the

equations, required to manifest that particular possibility.And through those equations, through those faculties and skills, we come

down to the last, the fourth stage which is the stage of manifestation.These were called the four stages of vibration, the four stages of speech,

the four stages of Vak in creation. First, the stage of Paravak, the Omnipotent,the All-Potential, descending to the next stage of Pashyanti, meaning to see,to visualize, not yet part of the creative process, but just visualising, knowingthe truth, having the truth. Then comes the stage of Madhyama, the stagewhere the laws and organisation take place, and then the stage of Vaikhari,externalising the final manifestation.

We ourselves, as beings growing up from the last stage to the first,understand first the last stage, which in the Mandukya is called the WakingState. We understand ourselves first in the Waking state, Jagrit Sthana asVaishwanarah, the ‘universal male’ who realises himself as Virat Purusha,‘king of kings’. In the Mandukya this is called the state which has “nineteenmouths” (nineteen receptors) and seven limbs (the seven levels of

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consciousness). What are these nineteen receptive faculties? First the fiveorgans of knowledge, the gyan indriyas, then five organs of action, the karmaindriyas, then the five pranas – the five breaths which work within us –,and then the four parts of our mental existence, chitta, manas, buddhi andahankara. These are the nineteen receptors in the waking state of the fourfoldbeing, and we first begin to understand our journey through this wakingstate, the first stage of the fourfold self.

Beyond that lies the Dream State, the swapna sthana, where the beingmanifests as Taijasa or Hiranyagarbha Purusha, the embryonic being, whereall the occult equations and forms exist, which create what we see and expressoutwardly in the Waking state.

Beyond that is the Sleep State, the sushupta sthana, which remains alwayswhether movement in time and space goes on or not. We can compare itwith the DNA in our cells. The DNA remains even when we die. It carriesthe potential, the structure, the knowledge, the laws of all that comes afterit.

Finally there is the state which transcends all, encompasses all, the All-potential, samadhi or turiya, in which the three other states lie.

Thus, there are four states: the Waking, the Dream, the Sleep and theSamadhi. The enlightened being knows all these states. Let us first readabout that full fourfold being which is what we have to reach:

In him the fourfold Being bore its crownThat wears the mystery of a nameless Name,The universe writing its tremendous senseIn the inexhaustible meaning of a word.

(p. 680)

That word is symbolised by the AUM in the Mandukya Unpanishad, whereit is said that all these four states lie in the AUM, as ‘a’, ‘u’ and ‘m’ togethermanifest ‘Aum’ – AUM understood not just as a word that we hear, but as asymphony and sum of all vibrations and all frequencies in space. Sometimeswe hear that, in silence. When we are in the space of silence, we hear thesound of that OM because that is the sum of all possible vibrations in space.

In him the architect of the visible world,

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At once the art and artist of his works,Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the sunsAnd the star-entangled ether is his hold,Expressed himself with Matter for his speech:Objects are his letters, forces are his words,Events are the crowded history of his life,And sea and land are the pages for his tale.Matter is his means and his spiritual sign;He hangs the thought upon a lash’s lift,

The state being evoked here is the state which exists in the “lash’s lift”, thewaking state, where the being is externalised in its infinite capacities ofmanifestation, in all forms, on land and sea, in matter, in the thought, in thedifferent pictures of thought, in every being, he “lights his camp-fires in thesuns”. Camp fires come from the divine illumining sun but are only a partof it, only a reminder of it. So the waking state is the state of infinite diversity,of infinite expression, which is called ‘brhat’ in the Veda. In the Veda toothey speak of three states, which again correspond to the sleep, dream, andwaking states: Satyam, Ritam, Brihat. Brihat is the vastness of all expression,of all knowledge in all things. Beyond that, just behind that, lies Ritam, theknowledge of all; and behind that lies Satyam, the truth which gives theknowledge, which leads to infinite expression.

Here Sri Aurobindo speaks of Virat, the outermost stage ofmanifestation in which we all live. However, we are living in a state ofignorance where we have not yet become consciously Virat, but are still‘Vaishvanarah’, the Universal Male. We have not yet learnt thetransmutability of our existence in this infinity, yet we carry its potentialwithin us.

He hangs the thought upon a lash’s lift,In the current of the blood makes flow the soul.

Every nerve, every cell, every cell of our brain, every cell of our blood, is anexpression of the infinity, of the fourfold being in his externalised wakingstate.

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His is the dumb will of atom and of clod;

A clod is a lump of earth; so he is also the dumb will of the atom and of theclod.

A Will that without sense or motive acts,An Intelligence needing not to think or plan,The world creates itself invincibly;For its body is the body of the LordAnd in its heart stands Virat, King of Kings.

The true expression of the Divine, what the Divine truly wants, is to expressitself in every manifestation as the Virat Purusha. The goal of life is forevery living being to become an expression of the infinite, transmutableinto infinite form. But to become Virat we must know what lies just beyondthat state. So we go back one step. We go back into the recesses of the self,to discover what governs the state of infinite existence, of infinitemanifestation. We read:

In him (in Virat) shadows his form the Golden ChildWho in the Sun-capped Vast cradles his birth:Hiranyagarbha, author of thoughts and dreams,Who sees the invisible and hears the soundsThat never visited a mortal ear,Discoverer of unthought realitiesTruer to Truth than all we have ever known,He is the leader on the inner roads;A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms;A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought,He builds the secret uncreated worlds.

(p.681)

Here Sri Aurobindo speaks of the occult realms and the occult equationsthat govern life and manifest before the external life is manifested. TheMother was a great occultist. She often spoke of those realms where all wasknown before it was manifest in the outer world. But if we look at ourselves,

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if we look at the truth of ourselves, if we look at the truth of every flowerand every plant, we can see this truth and these levels in it – for instance, theequations of life, the numbers of life which govern existence. When wecome down to the detail of the secret of our existence, just beyond what wesee, we are governed by cycles and by numbers.

For instance, the petals of a sunflower are ordered by an interestingsequence of numbers. The petals in a sunflower fit perfectly becausesome of the petals spiral in a clockwise direction while others spiral inan anti-clockwise direction, in such a way that the ultimate picture is apicture of perfection, the ultimate manifestation is beautiful and perfectand optimum. What is the secret that makes it so perfect? We can discoverthe law of numbers that lies just behind it. It is called a FibonacciSequence, where the next number in the series is the sum of the precedingtwo numbers. So the first number is 1. The next number is 1 + 0, whichis 1. The next number is 1 + 1 which is 2; then comes 3, then 5, then 8,then 13, and so on. It goes on like this to 54 and 89 and so on. In asunflower the arrangement of the spirals of petals follows this sequence.One spiral goes to 89 and the other spiral will count up to 54. Eachplant when it begins to bud follows this sequence, the FibonacciSequence. It is governed by that sequence of numbers which we do notsee. We see it differentiated into petals and leaves and bark and sap andso on. But just behind lies a governing law, an occult equation.

This is one analogy from amongst the infinite number of analogiesthat we can find in nature, which show us this state, the embryonicstate, Hiranyagarbha, which is controlling the outer manifestation. Stillbehind that is the third seed state which we will come to later.

Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye,

With the opening of the third eye, which here Sri Aurobindo calls ‘thediamond eye’ we become knowers of that which lies just behind the surface.

His is the vision and the prophecy:Imagist casting the formless into shape,Traveller and hewer of the unseen paths,He is the carrier of the hidden fire,

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The golden embryo is ‘the carrier of the hidden fire’. This hidden fire wewill speak of a little later in more detail.

He is the voice of the Ineffable,He is the invisible hunter of the light,The Angel of mysterious ecstasies,The conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.

When man knows, when he has the sight of that state which makes himwhat he is, then he reaches the level where he can play with those laws,transmute them and transform them into perfection.

To recapitulate, the first state, the state of infinite expression, the wakingstate, is the state where we take in and give out through our senses. Thatstate is called jagrat sthana: the waking state. Then there is the swapnasthana: the dream state which governs the laws, which is equated with theMadhyama stage which I spoke of earlier, the Madhyama Vak.

Beyond the dream or embryonic state we come to the third state, thelevel of the Seed, which is also called the Sleep State or sushupta sthana,which he now describes:

A third spirit stood behind, their hidden cause,A mass of superconscience closed in light,Creator of things in his all-knowing sleep.All from his stillness came as grows a tree;He is our seed and our core, our head and base.All light is but a flash from his closed eyes:An all-wise Truth is mystic in his heart,

This third state is the vision which does not take part in the movementbut holds the key to the movement, the Seed or Sleep state, sushuptasthana.

We can find that secret in ourselves, in the DNA. The DNA is that part ofour cells which is enclosed within the nucleus of the cell. DNA stands for “De-oxy ribonucleic Acid. It has missing one atom of oxygen, that is why it is calledDe-oxy ribonucleic acid. This substance contains the secret of what we are. Itcontains all the information needed to make us, but it does not move. It stays

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quiet and stable within the nucleus. It does not take part in the movement. Yet itpasses on the vision, the information which lies in the DNA through the RNA -ribonucleic acid. This RNA has got that one crucial atom of oxygen, whichmakes it move, which makes it organize, which makes it unfold the laws that liebehind existence. So the RNA represents the dream state. It then breaks up intodifferent proteins and amino-acids which create the different processes in ourbody, becoming the waking state, the Vaishvanarah, the Virat.

So the fourfold being unfolds in every cell of our body, and in every cellof our consciousness. And this third spirit, the sleep state, the seed state, isthat which carries all, which has the vision but does not take part in themovement. It just passes on the vision to that which moves and creates lawsand finally manifests.

Shruti during the Isha Upanishad workshopat Savitri Bhavan from August 20th to 25th, 2002

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Creator of things in his all-knowing sleep.All from his stillness came as grows a tree;He is our seed and core, our head and base.All light is but a flash from his closed eyes:An all-wise Truth is mystic in his heart,The omniscient Ray is shut behind his lids;He is the Wisdom that comes not by thought,His wordless silence brings the immortal word.He sleeps in the atom and the burning star,He sleeps in man and god and beast and stone:Because he is there the Inconscient does its work,Because he is there the world forgets to die.He is the centre of the circle of the God,He the circumference of Nature’s run.

(p.681)

What a beautiful expression! “He is the centre of the circle of God.” He isthat point from which everything comes out and radiates into the wholevastness, the whole ever-expanding circle of existence. But this seed is also“the circumference of Nature’s run”. When Nature runs in time and space,when it completes the knowledge of its vibration, when it understands allthat it is in time and space, then Nature comes to its outermost limit whichbrings her in contact with the potential, the sleep state, the seed state. Whenthe being becomes knowledgeable of the seed state, it reaches thecircumference, the outer limit of its running, and comes to that limit whereit is in touch both with the movement and with the Omniscient.

He is the circumference of Nature’s run.

In the fourth state, the state of Samadhi, these three states become one – inthe All-knowing, the All-potential, the Transcendent which encompassesall in “the inexhaustible meaning of a Word’ in “the sole timeless Word thatcarries eternity in its lonely sound’ (p.97).

Above was the brooding bliss of the Infinite,Its omniscient and omnipotent repose,

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Its immobile silence absolute and alone.All powers were woven in countless concords here.

(p.682)

This then is what we are in our four folds, and our journey is to becomeconscious of these four folds of our existence. We have just spoken of Hewho is All-consciousness, who expresses these fourfolds, who is the FourfoldBeing, and we are urged to move towards this awareness, towards thisexpression. How do we move towards this expression? From Brihat to Ritamto Satyam, to the encompassing of the whole?

PainIn his great epic, Sri Aurobindo speaks of many paths towards this goal.One important helper on the way is ‘the dark intruding god’ as he calls it,which is Pain. ‘Pain is the hand of Nature’ he says, ‘sculpturing men / Togreatness:’, and also:

Pain is the hammer of the Gods to breakA dead resistance in the mortal’s heart,

(p. 443)

This is the role of pain in the yoga of life; and the Divine uses it in twoways. He uses it gently as a chisel to sculpture man to greatness; but he alsouses it as a hammer when we become too hard and crystallised:

Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing menTo greatness: an inspired labour chiselsWith heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.Implacable in the passion of their will,Lifting the hammers of titanic toilThe demiurges of the universe work;They shape with giant strokes their own; their sonsAre marked with their enormous stamp of fire.Although the shaping god’s tremendous touchIs torture unbearable to mortal nerves,

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The fiery spirit grows in strength withinAnd feels a joy in every titan pang.

(p. 444)

When the potter prepares a pot, the clay has to be heated to high degrees oftemperature before it can shine and become strong enough to bear the outwardtouches of nature and manifest the creator’s beauty. Similarly, the Divineprepares us through this unbearable heat of pain. We feel his touch as painbecause we are not flexible enough to manifest his will. Wherever there isrigidity and resistance, there is pain; and pain is that ‘dark intruding God’who helps to dissolve this hardness, to dissolve the inertia and make usmove, make us flexible in vibration, so that the Lord’s will may be done.

Creativity and the quest for perfectionSri Aurobindo hints at other ways in his yoga. He speaks of creativity beingamongst the first steps towards realising the godhead. He speaks of painting,sculpture and architecture. Each of us is being trained by our father, theDivine, each of us is an acolyte of the Divine:

A mystic acolyte trained in Nature’s school,Aware of the marvel of created thingsShe laid the secrecies of her heart’s deep museUpon the altar of the Wonderful;

(p. 360)

When we seek the All-wonderful in his creation, and seek to express our creativityas a picture of the Divine, then through our perfection, we reach the Divine.Through the Powers of the Mother we reach the Divine. Through skill in works,through the play of creativity, through allowing the hand of Mahakali to breakus and re-chisel us when we become hard, through the wisdom of Maheshwari,we reach the divine Mother, we reach the all-manifest God.

Intense philosophies pointed earth to heavenOr on foundations broad as cosmic SpaceUpraised the earth-mind to superhuman heights.

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Overpassing lines that please the outward eyesBut hide the sight of that which lives withinSculpture and painting concentrated senseUpon an inner vision’s motionless verge,Revealed a figure of the invisible,Unveiled all Nature’s meaning in a form,Or caught into a body the Divine.

(p. 360)

Each effort of creation by us is a seeking of the divine within us to expressitself. We want to see that primordial perfection in our creation, and themore and more we perfect this creation of ours the closer we move towardsthe knowledge of the Divine.

The architecture of the InfiniteDiscovered here its inward-musing shapesCaptured into wide breadths of soaring stone:Music brought down celestial yearnings, songHeld the merged heart absorbed in rapturous depths,Linking the human with the cosmic cry;

(p. 360-361)

These lines reveals to us of the role of music in bringing us into onenesswith the sublime, connecting us with the Divine through sound.

MantraThe role of the mantra in helping the growth of consciousness is describedby Sri Aurobindo in a beautiful passage:

As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,Its message enters stirring the blind brainAnd keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;The hearer understands a form of wordsAnd, musing on the index thought it holds,He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

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But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:Then, falling silent in himself to knowHe meets the deeper listening of his soul:The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body’s selfAre seized unutterably and he enduresAn ecstacy and an immortal change;He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:Transmuted by the white spiritual rayHe walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:An equal greatness in her life was sown.

(p. 375)

This speaks of the power of the mantra to transport us to our true selves.These are helpers on the way, tools of the godhead which take us to ourrightful home, deep within ourselves.

Thus Sri Aurobindo shows us how each aspect of creativity in nature,each form of expression, can be used as a tool to move towards divineperfection, whether it is art or music, whether it is sculpture, or the word asphilosophy, or the word as sight in a yantra which is the visual symbol of amantra.

Science tells us that when the OM is projected on to a lump of dust on avibrating membrane, it reorganises the dust particles into a symbol which isa circle, with triangles and diamonds one within the other around a commoncentre. This lump of dust, vibrating with the sound of OM, becomes a mysticsymbol, a perfectly symmetric geometrical symbol which represents creation,the Sri Yantra. So when the word of god enters us, when the truly harmoniousprimordial seed sound enters us, it reshapes us – we who are nothing but dust –matter, our cells, our atoms are reoriented into their primordial harmony, intotheir primordial symmetry. Then we feel at ease, we feel at home, we feel closerto our true selves.

We see here how all art forms, all creative forms in life, can lead ustowards our own perfection, lead us towards making ourselves a true vehicleof the Spirit. In this process, we discover that the way to make all these

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manifestations perfect is to draw from within; and as we go along in life,dealing with pain, dealing with the knocks of life, we learn to understandthat pain is the forerunner of joy. We learn to understand that pain and joyare ‘the bright and tenebrous twins’, as Sri Aurobindo calls them in Savitri.‘But pain came first, then only joy could be’, he says. Unless we go throughthe pain of perfecting every cell and muscle of our consciousness, we cannotmake the body of our consciousness fit. So pain may be used willingly ormay be taken on unwillingly, the choice is ours. When we accept this painwillingly, we know that we are on our way to greater joy, to a greaterperfection. And as this knowledge increases, we come to know where the sourceof this knowledge is, and slowly come in touch with that spark which lies deepwithin us, which is the spark of the Divine, which in the Veda is called Agni –the son of Surya.

The process of going within is described in the next passage.

Going withinTo see the importance of pratyahara, going deep within, to refresh the outerbeing with the knowledge of what it truly is, let us look at a passage in theCanto called “The Secret Knowledge” in The Book of Beginnings. Here thepoet speaks of this part of us, which we must refer to again and again for ourYoga, for our progress in life.

In moments when the inner lamps are litAnd the life’s cherished guests are left outside,Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.

(p. 47)

Our gulfs are the depths within us which are still, surrounded, enclosed,away from the waves of the ocean of life, away from the tumultuous waves;the waters are still in the gulfs and in that stillness lies the truth and depth ofour being.

A wider consciousness opens then its doors; Invading from spiritual silences A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile

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To commune with our seized illumined clay And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives. … A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul; We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead’s touch In golden privacies of immortal fire.

(p. 48)

Agni“In golden privacies of immortal fire.” – Agni, the divine spark, the leaderon the way, purohitam, the priest of our ultimate surrender to the Divine,the knower of all things, jata veda.

It is the origin and the master-clue,A silence overhead, an inner voice,A living image seated in the heart,An unwalled wideness and a fathomless point,The truth of all these cryptic shows in Space,The Real towards which our strivings move,The secret grandiose meaning of our lives.A treasure of honey in the combs of God,

(p. 49)

This origin, this spark is what we truly are. This vayuranilam, this Agni,goes on from life to life and forms the body again and again; but it is not thebody and it is not the mind as we know it. For as the Isha Upanishad says:

Vayuranilam amritamathedam bhasmantam shariram

Vayuranilam is the breath of things, the spark within; amritam is animmortal life; bhasmantam sariram means “of this body ashes are the end”.

Om krato smara kritam smara krato smara kritam smara

Krato – O Seer-will, O spark of the Divine, O Agni! Smara – remember.Kritam smara – that which was done, remember.

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O Will, O spark! Come forward and remember, that which was doneremember! Where have we come from? What road have we traversed? Whyare we here? What is the goal? What have we been doing? What is it thathas to be done?

So we call to that inner voice, that inner spark, that Seer-will, that Agni,that ‘honey in the combs of God’. Each manifestation is a honeycomb ofGod, and that spark which is our essence is the honey within each comb.This great spark thus is Agni, the son of the divine light, Surya.

A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak,It is our glory of the flame of God,Our golden fountain of the world’s delight,An immortality cowled in the cape of death,The shape of our unborn divinity.It guards for us our fate in depths withinWhere sleeps the eternal seed of transient things.Always we bear in us a magic keyConcealed in life’s hermetic envelope.

(p. 49)

This Agni, this spark, this inner voice, is the magic key which is enclosed inthis outer envelope of the triple cord of existence: anna, prana, and mana –matter, life-energy and mind. Until we understand what this triple cord is, itremains binding on us. It remains as a ‘hermetic envelope’, a tightly-sealedenvelope, within which is this magic key which holds the secret of allexistence. And the effort of life after life of the being, through each moment,through each life, is to slowly dissolve the seal from the envelope so that wemay have a sight of the key and so that we may use this key to transformlife, to open the door to felicity and eternal bliss.

A burning Witness in the sanctuaryRegards through Time and the blind walls of Form;A timeless Light is in his hidden eyes;He sees the secret things no words can speakAnd knows the goal of the unconscious worldAnd the heart of the mystery of the journeying years.

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The ChrysalisYet, to know this key we must know how to handle the envelope. We musttake the journey back to the origin. We cannot escape the journey; we haveto go through the process of Prakriti, and learn to understand every colour,every shape of Nature and in its heart find the key, the inner light, the innertruth of all things.

That is why, in the Canto called ‘The Debate of Love and Death’, SriAurobindo says:

A mute material Nature wakes and sees;She has invented speech, unveiled a will.Something there waits beyond towards which she strives,Something surrounds her into which she grows:To uncover the spirit, to change back into God,To exceed herself is her transcendent task.In God concealed the world began to be,Tardily it travels towards manifest God:Our imperfection towards perfection toils,The body is the chrysalis of a soul:

(p. 623)

The chrysalis is the cocoon inside which the caterpillar turns into a butterfly.The crust of ego and ignorance, avidya, is the cocoon which hides the trueself within. Slowly, as we manage to dissolve and break the crust, the truebeautiful divine self springs forth and flies with free wings to manifest itscolours in nature.

The body is the chrysalis of a soul:The infinite holds the finite in its arms,Time travels towards revealed eternity.

Each one of us feels that stir deep within us, knowing that it exists, knowingof the inner voice that calls out to us. Sometimes the pulls and pushes of lifemake us deaf to that voice; and yet if we take refuge in the silent chambersof our heart we come closer to that voice and are able to hear it again. Whenwe bring ourselves closer to the beauty of nature, to the beauty of the art of

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life, to the magic of the word of God, to the sound of the silence within us,we are able to hear the inner self speak.

I have felt a secret spirit stir in thingsCarrying the body of the growing God:It looks through veiling forms at veilless truth;It pushes back the curtain of the gods;It climbs towards its own eternity.

(p. 693)

We pray to that inner self, to that Seer-will which leads us from light tolight, to that Agni, to lead us on the right path to felicity, to bliss:

Om agne naya supatharaye asman vishwani deva vayunani vidvanYuyodhyasmajjuhuranameno bhuyishtham te nama uktim vidhema

O Agni! O leader of the ultimate surrender! Lead us on the true path to bliss.O Agni, you who are the knower of all things manifested, remove from usthe devious attraction of ignorance, division and sin. With our entire beingwe implore thee to lead us on the true path to eternal bliss.

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Savitri Bhavan Regular Activities

The regular ongoing activities at Savitri Bhavan include the following study-circles, courses and classes.

All our readers are warmly invited to join any of these activities when theyare in the area.

REGULAR COURSES

Sunday morning 10.30 -12.00 Savitri Study Circleevening 5.00 - 6.30 The Human Cycle,

led by Kittu ReddyMonday evening 5.30 - 6.30 Cultivating Concentration,

led by Jai SinghTuesday evening 4.30 - 5.15 Entretiens - The Mother's

Playground talks 5.30 - 6.30 The Synthesis of Yoga,

led by ShraddhavanThursday evening 4.00 - 5.00 The English of Savitri,

led by ShraddhavanFriday evening 5.30 - 6.30 Cultivating Concentration,

led by Jai Singh

Exhibition, Office and Reading Room openMonday - Saturday 9 - 12, 2 - 5

Everyone is welcome

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“ LIGHT OF SAVITRI ”

We are happy to announce that some well-wishers have formed anorganisation under this name, with the aim of spreading awareness of SriAurobindo’s Savitri in Tamil Nadu and gaining support for the Savitri Bhavanproject. As a first step, they have organised a programme of Vedic Chantingof the whole of Savitri in several Sri Aurobindo Centres. This was initiatedin Trichy, Srirangam, Tanjore and Kumbakonam on October 20th and willbe started in other centres on November 17th . The idea is to conduct VedicChanting of Savitri over 144 weeks (1 + 4 + 4 = 9, the date on which theMaster’s body was laid to rest) covering 5 pages per week (5 x 144 = 724pages). What is meant by “Vedic Chanting”? It means group reading inwhich one person with a good knowledge of English pronunciation givesthe lead by first reading one line, which is then repeated by all present,before going on to the next. It is expected that each session of readingfive pages will last about 30 minutes. The time chosen for this activityis 11.30 a.m. Indian Standard Time, which correponds to 6 a.m. GMT. Theorganisers suggest that other centres and groups elsewhere in India andaround the world could take up the same programme, preferably at the sametime, or otherwise at their own convenience, but regularly, to create apowerful atmosphere of the vibration of Savitri.

LIGHT OF SAVITRI(A LITERARY WING)

8 / 15 Velappa Naidu Nagar, Peelamedu,Coimbatore – 641 004. Phone : 0422 – 573481.

Object :

To conduct, organise and execute programmes and seminars on Savitri withthe approval of Savitri Bhavan.

To work for the goal and dream of Savitri Bhavan.

This literary wing does not raise any funds independently.It will function strictly on the directions of Savitri Bhavan.

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Organisers

CoordinatorR. Kuppusamy,8 / 15 Velappa Naidu Nagar,Peelamedu.Coimbatore - 614004Phone : 0422 - 573481

V. Balasubramanian,(VBK Computers )2 D Fort Station Road,Trichy – 620002.Phone : 0431 - 700820

Lakshmi Renganathan,69 Bakthapuri,Kumbakonam – 612201.Phone : 0435 – 430644

N. Suresh Kumar,110 Periyar Nagar,Thiruvanaikovil,Trichy – 620005.Phone : 98424 45234

Krishna Vaidhiyasubramanian65 / 33 Kamarajar Road,Srinivasapuram,Tanjore – 613009.Phone : 04362 – 32314

“We aspire for the SAVITRI ENVIRONMENT all over the world”

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About Savitri Bhavan

We dream of an environment in Auroville

that will breathe the atmosphere of Savitri

that will welcome Savitri lovers from every corner ofthe world

that will be an inspiring centre of Savitri studies

that will house all kinds of materials and activities toenrich our understanding and enjoyment ofSri Aurobindo’s revelatory epic

that will be the abode of Savitri, the Truth that hascome from the Sun

We welcome support from everyone who feels that thevibration of Savitri will help to manifest a better tomorrow.

INVITATION

Savitri Bhavan is entirely dependent on donations, and financial helpfrom all well-wishers is most welcome. We invite everyone who feels thevalue of the work of Savitri Bhavan to make this 125th Anniversary Yearof the Mother the occasion to pledge their on-going support to the reali-sation of this Dream. Please consider in what way you could help theDream of Savitri Bhavan to become a reality � whether by a lump-sumdonation, or by commitment to a regular monthly or yearly amount.

How to send your help

If you live in India :! Personal cheques or DDs may be made payable to �S.A.I.I.E.R.� and

sent to Savitri Bhavan.! Money orders may be made payable to �Savitri Bhavan� and sent to

the same address.

If you live outside India :! Cheques or Bankers� Orders payable to �S.A.I.I.E.R.� may be sent

directly to Savitri Bhavan! Money may be transferred directly by using the following code :

SWIFT Code : SBININBBAFXDState Bank of India, Branch Code: 03160Auroville International Township BranchKuilapalayam Auroville � 605101 INDIAAuroville Fund Foreign A/c No. 01000060095Purpose �SAVITRI BHAVAN�

! You may send your donation through the AVI Centre in your country.In some countries, this may entitle you to tax-relief.

Please specify whether you would like your donation to be used for on-going activities, construction, or some specified project.

For further information, please contact :

Savitri BhavanAuroville 605101

Tamil Nadu. INDIA

Telephone : 0091 (0)413 2622 922e-mail : [email protected]

Savitriis a Mantra

for the transformationof the world

The Mother

invocation 17

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